This is a fantastic comment. I agree 100%. The smartest things I have achieved came from not giving up and not being too lazy to just do the hard work the hard way when I couldn’t find a shortcut.
I had the somewhat cliched experience of a teacher wanting to bump me into the special needs class, and then testing out of their class entirely.
I was a very earnest kid, and up until that point I took everything my teachers told me literally. "This is how you learn" and everything felt like pushing boulders up a hill. Once I had 'permission' to build my own mental models from the examples provided by the teacher and dismiss their suggestions for how to organize the information... they could barely talk fast enough for my liking.
These 'models' I would discover later were very like the scientific method. Rote memorization was my absolute nemesis. Hypothesis, attack, defend, revise, repeat. As an adult, people who noticed this about me have asked, "Hey hinkley, I need these people to do <task you've never done before>, can you keep an eye on them?" After the initial panic, within a couple minutes of peppering them with seemingly random questions I can often answer, "sure", and have a sense of what questions I can run through the ersatz model, even go a bit off script, and which ones really require me to interrupt the expert.
When I'm entirely wrong, it's back to pushing boulders uphill again. The ones I remember clearly though are the ones where I was truly awful but motivated to trudge through. If giving myself permission to be a polymath is the best thing I've ever done for myself, giving myself permission to be bad at something for a long time is the second best thing. If I get to the end of my life and find that these turn out to be the things I was best at teaching to others, I won't be surprised at all. "An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in a narrow field of study." Nothing seems to get me repeat customers like being able to tell someone I came to the same conclusion, and here's a counter example and a better way to think about that problem.
hinkley|5 years ago
I was a very earnest kid, and up until that point I took everything my teachers told me literally. "This is how you learn" and everything felt like pushing boulders up a hill. Once I had 'permission' to build my own mental models from the examples provided by the teacher and dismiss their suggestions for how to organize the information... they could barely talk fast enough for my liking.
These 'models' I would discover later were very like the scientific method. Rote memorization was my absolute nemesis. Hypothesis, attack, defend, revise, repeat. As an adult, people who noticed this about me have asked, "Hey hinkley, I need these people to do <task you've never done before>, can you keep an eye on them?" After the initial panic, within a couple minutes of peppering them with seemingly random questions I can often answer, "sure", and have a sense of what questions I can run through the ersatz model, even go a bit off script, and which ones really require me to interrupt the expert.
When I'm entirely wrong, it's back to pushing boulders uphill again. The ones I remember clearly though are the ones where I was truly awful but motivated to trudge through. If giving myself permission to be a polymath is the best thing I've ever done for myself, giving myself permission to be bad at something for a long time is the second best thing. If I get to the end of my life and find that these turn out to be the things I was best at teaching to others, I won't be surprised at all. "An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in a narrow field of study." Nothing seems to get me repeat customers like being able to tell someone I came to the same conclusion, and here's a counter example and a better way to think about that problem.